Thread: Carl Gustav Jung - Videos, Books, Ruminations

08 28 17 Books-3 by Darkmatters, on Flickr

These are all new except for Becoming- not sure how that one got in there!

Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts - Daryl Sharp
The Mystical Qabalah - Dion Fortune
The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit - Donald Kalsched
The Aion Lectures - Edwin F Edinger
The Creation of Consciousness - Edwin F Edinger
Pathways To Bliss - Joseph Campbell
Aurora Consurgens - Marie-Louise Von Franz
The Fear of the Feminine - Erich Neumann
The Interpretation of Fairy Tales - Marie-Louise Von Franz
The Religious Function of the Psyche - Lionel Corbett

The (Jungian) Books Keep Rolling In - to the links on my blog - you know the drill by now.

I've also got the entire Bible now - including the 4th volume, which is an index.

The Qabala is the source for both the Tarot and Astrology apparently, or so I keep seeing (ok, not the source - it came later but does combine them excellently into its matrix). But there are all kinds of claims made about it by various groups - many of which seem weird and cultish. For me it's another source of symbolism to enrich the inner artistic world.

Aurora Consurgens, which means Rising Dawn, is a medieval text about Alchemy attributed fascinatingly to Thomas Aquinas, and supposedly written in a feverish state in his final days after suffering a blow on the head and experiencing some kind of profound enlightenment. Von Franz believed he was undergoing individuation and had realized that in fact that is the mysterious process the Alchemists were really engaged in. If she's right, they believed they were transforming base matter but were actually transforming their own personalities by coming into a more open and honest relation to the unconscious Self and projecting that process onto the matter that they were so busily mixing and melting. The physical transformation of metals became a stand-in for the inner psychological transformation. My God I love this stuff!! That said though, I don't recommend Aurora Consurgens - instead I recommend the green Alchemy book listed below, for reasons I'll explain in a moment.



08 28 17 Books-4 by Darkmatters, on Flickr

These are the ones I've finished - and the one on the front of the bundle is new since last time:
Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology - Marie-Louise Von Franz

Alchemy with the striking green cover is my favorite of the bunch so far. Von Franz wrote it after wading laboriously through Aurora Consurgens (in the top picture). That one was a hard slog through dense territory - written essentially to analyze the very difficult material. Only after doing that was she able to condense the symbolism and pen this much more readable and in fact amazing little book. Though I don't think I would have understood parts of it without having read a few of the other books on these stacks to get a grounding in the Jungian concepts.

Note - you do NOT NEED to read anywhere near this many books to grasp Jung!! I'm going deep DEEP! With probably 3 or 4 of these you can understand the majority of it. I would recommend a few by Edinger and maybe Murray Stein for that purpose. Though if you're into it, you really should also read Jung in his own words, with some assistance by Edinger and maybe Stein.

I also highly highly recommend the books I've listed by Erich Neumann, though they can also be fairly dense and hard to understand at times. Now we just need somebody to come along and write books explaining his books!